The secret of Dhoni's success

Shantanu Guha Ray goes to Mahendra Singh Dhoni's hometown of Ranchi to try uncover the reasons behind Dhoni's rise to the top despite hailing from a small town and not having either formal training or a godfather to push his case. He writes in Tehelka:

In a world of desperate image-building, it’s important that Dhoni doesn’t care. The core value he brings to the job is level-headedness — the clear sense of reality that helps a small town boy prioritise life. This means he has the ability to treat cricket as a game, not as religion. This means it makes him unafraid to take his chances, to run the impossible risk and win the impossible gambit.

He retraces Dhoni's progress from the initial interest in football to the current standing as a cricket icon whose fans "buy garlands and worship — in the absence of the man himself — his bikes". He also compares Dhoni's captaincy with that of his two immediate predecessors.

In Dhoni’s ability to walk the middle ground lies the essential metaphor of his personality: character is fortune. Saurav Ganguly wore the cloak of captaincy with the arrogance of a Caesar, the mantle falling easily on his stylish shoulders. Rahul Dravid, on the other hand, wore the coveted badge almost like a crown of thorns, as if acting out a middle class mindset in which success or failure are the only parameters that define ability ... In Dhoni's worldview, playing is more important than winning, and winning is more important than verbal duels.